The best Canadian fiction of all time as chosen by Canadian novelists

Anosh Irani is nominated this year for The Parcel, the powerful story of a hijra, a person belonging to the third sex, in Bombay’s red-light district.

Irani’s pick: “A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It’s such an intimate epic. Its scope is tremendous — it reflects the injustice of a nation through the inner lives of four characters: a young Parsi man, an older Parsi woman, and two tailors — but at no point does it lose its humanity. When I first read this novel, it made my insides churn, but it also came with the luminescence that only the highest forms of art can offer.”